Hi y'all. Came across this jam, annoyingly a little too late to join part 1, and it sounds like fun but tbh I'm a little confused. I'm not tryna be that one that complains but I'm kinda confused how the majority of the high ranking games on this are way over 3 hours? 

I understand it does say it's ok to go overtime but I'm seeing multiple with 2-3 hours over which feels a little excessive so I'm a little wary of joining since I wanna stick to the time limit and have fun working with that limitation but it feels like whatever I submit will get lost and outshone by the multitude of games that have taken way over 3 hours to produce.

Apologies if this seems overly negative, it just feels like there should be some form of penalisation for going that far over the time limit and not just disqualification from 1st place since 2nd place is still a relatively prestigious position that even a game that takes 7-8 hours to create would still potentially be able to claim

I think that since there really isn't much prestige in winning other than bragging rights it's not that deep :)

The only thing that's recognised is whether you are the winner which is always restricted to those who performed in 3 hours or less.

The point of the jam is to hone your planning skills with respect to game development and under that light it doesn't seem in the spirit to heavily punish those who happen to screw up one time :P

As a member of a team that often goes overtime, sometimes well over, we do the jam just to have fun and make a game we are proud of. So if our game just doesn't really work when we hit 3 hours, we will go overtime to get everything done. Usually what happens with us is it takes multiple (2-3) hours to just finish things up, or sometimes we might just decide we want to go overtime to do our idea justice.

I've done probably 20 trijams at this point, and especially with my solo games i find the 3 hours not leaving me enough time to make something that feels fleshed out. In terms of getting recognition, actually a large portion really just comes down to a good thumbnail, and commenting on other people's submissions.